Something Appalling

While the school play generates more than the usual drama for Evangeline, Sebastian suspects a villain has returned.

East End Irregulars: The Dismal Tide (Chapter IV)

(Find other chapters in The Story Directory.)

Something Appalling

By Michael A. DiBaggio and Shell "Presto" DiBaggio

Sebastian was flying high on Wednesday morning. Although his fevered imagination denied him more than four consecutive hours of sleep, he still sprung out of bed ten minutes before his alarm went off, practically vibrating with libidinous energy. Over and over, his mind replayed Eva’s surprised, slightly panicked whimper as he first darted his tongue into her mouth and the muffled moan of submission that followed. The taste of her fruit-punch lip gloss was beginning to fade, but in less than an hour, he’d taste it again.

He showered, dressed, and went downstairs. His mother was sitting in the breakfast nook, sipping a half-drained cup of coffee and scrolling through the morning news feed.

“Good morning, Ma,” he said, grabbing a mug out of the cabinet.

“Good morning, hon,” Linda Pereira yawned. “Miserable day out there.”

Outside, the wind whipped the tree branches and horizontal rain splattered on the windowpane.

“Is it? Hmm.” Sebastian shrugged and smiled. This day was getting better and better. “I guess I’ll just drive to school today.” He crumbled a bar of dark chocolate into his mug and drowned it in boiling water from the kettle.

“Don’t get lazy now just because you have a car,” his mother said. She lifted her eyes then, watching him drop a shot of heavy cream into his cup. She opened her mouth to speak, then hesitated, brushing a strand of long, brown hair behind her ear.

He mixed the hot chocolate vigorously, then looked back at her, returning her glance with his own questioning smile. “What’s up?”

His mother shook her head. “Uh, Sebastian honey, I wanted to ask you… when you go out at night, you don’t ever go along the railroad tracks or cross those gypsy gangs, do you?”

The word ‘gypsy,’ in his family’s parlance, referred not to fortune-tellers and purveyors of werewolf curses, but to a more mundane, yet amorphous evil comprising all itinerants, from carnies to professional beggars. In particular, it applied to train-riding hobos.

He intentionally raised the cup of scalding cocoa to his mouth, burning his lips to delay his response a moment. ‘Why is she asking that?’ he thought.

“Ouch,” he hissed, then shook his head. “No. No, I don’t.” He forced a laugh and cocked his head at her like it was a ridiculous question. “Why?”

“There’s been some scary news coming out about them,” she said. “And I remember your unhealthy interest in them.”

When he was very young, Sebastian saw a TV commercial featuring a cheery vagabond and his dog criss-crossing the continent, sampling different brands of pop. The joke was that, once the hobo tasted A-Treat birch beer, he decided to settle down and buy a house. Thereafter, Sebastian’s flights of imagination often involved him and Fwuffers, his Husky, eating hamburgers and gulping root beer as they looked out over frothing river gorges from the side of a freight car. It was only a passing fancy, soon eclipsed by his desire to be a superhero, but the innocent fantasy horrified his mother. She spent the next decade harping about the sinister schemes of these ‘gypsies’ and the deadly peril they posed to the civilized world, all of which fired Sebastian’s imagination in a way that a cola advertisement never could.

“Yeah, when I was four,” Sebastian scoffed. “Anyway, are you talking about the mad gasser?”

“Mad gasser?”

“Yeah, there were all these chemical attacks along the railway—”

“Chemicals? No. I hadn’t heard about that,” his mother interrupted, half-ignoring what he’d said. She had a habit of doing that whenever she was worked up about something. “These gypsies have come down with hideous diseases: flesh-eating bacteria, coughing up blood… some end up up blind or crippled. Do you think it’s because of chemicals the trains are carrying?”

Sebastian unconsciously clenched his jaw, indignation at the Miasma cover-up swamping his good mood. “No, not on the trains,” he snapped. “Some nutcase was hosing them down with toxic chemicals. It was in the papers a couple days ago.”

Linda clucked her tongue. “Get out! I didn’t read anything about that.”

‘I daresay,’ he thought.

“Well the Free Press just had an article this morning about a gypsy who lost all coordination on one side of his body, some sort of stroke, I guess. But he was only in his twenties, and he didn’t say anything about being sprayed. He said a young girl did it, that she made a bunch of them really sick.”

“Oh? A girl? Not a guy in a plague doctor’s mask?” His mother shot him a confused look. “Uh, that’s what the papers said,” Sebastian fibbed.

“A young girl,” she repeated. Her tone and the nervous way she tugged at her napkin conveyed her reticence to elaborate, but it was clear to Sebastian she had already formed a definite opinion about how the disease transmission had occurred: transients were kiddy-diddlers. He often wondered about the source of this fervent conviction. Did his mother have a childhood friend who disappeared into the back of the proverbial windowless van? The thought of asking about it always left him a little queasy.

But in this case, it didn't matter. He knew who was to blame and it certainly wasn't a young girl.

“Where was this?”

“South of Bridgeville. But it said there were some other unusual reports in Pittsburgh going back several weeks. Here, read.”

She slid the slate across the table toward him, and he sat on the bench next to her and scanned the story. There was a quote from a Dr. Alvi at Mercy Hospital suggesting that there was an asymptomatic plague carrier riding the rails, and a contradicting opinion by an Asclepian Society epidemiologist named Mallon who said there was no single disease known to cause the varied array of reported symptoms. ‘No shit,’ thought Sebastian. ‘Because they were caused by a demented criminal who gets his jollies by poisoning people.’ On the other hand, the recency of some of the reports made him wonder. Could the honorable Constable Jerningham have recovered so quickly from his injuries? Or did he had a confederate — the young woman mentioned by the victim — a daughter, perhaps?

Sebastian pushed the slate back to his mother and shrugged his shoulders. “Scary. But I guess you’re bound to get sick tramping around the wilderness, unwashed and malnourished.”

His mother shivered with disgust. “I can’t figure out why anyone would want to live like that! Freezing wet, starving yourself, drinking dirty water, getting carved up by murderers or run over by trains! And with all the cameras and security systems they must have on those smart rails, I don’t see why they can’t keep them out of there, either.”

“Tell me about it.” Sebastian leaned against the bench and blew on his hot chocolate. He’d already pushed the story out of his mind as yesterday’s news. Much as he’d like to take a jaunt up to Zelienople and pay a visit to Rodney Jerningham, prudence cautioned against it. Sure, it might be easy for Sebastian and Alex to kick down his door, but it would be just as easy for Jerningham to blow a hole through both their bellies and be lauded as a hero for defending his home against two invading thugs. And the police, equal parts lazy and corrupt, would be only too happy to wrap up the investigation of the railway gassings by pinning the blame on them. Jerningham had enough influence to escape arrest that night; who knew what else he was capable of, especially on his home turf. Superpowers or not, Sebastian wasn’t going to charge into the teeth of a conspiracy. Nevertheless, he felt confident that this story would play itself out, and though justice would be delayed, it would catch up with Miasma eventually. It had to.

A few minutes later, Sebastian’s sister, Olivia, plodded into the kitchen. She was still wrapped in her bathrobe, her lower lip stuck out and her heavy eyelids almost completely closed against the gray and gloomy daylight.

Sebastian turned to his mother and quipped, “Can you believe she just wakes up looking that good?”

“Bite me,” Olivia rasped before breaking into a phlegmy cough.

“I think you’d better warn your daughter to keep away from hobos,” Sebastian said.

“What?” Olivia shook her head. “Never mind. Shut up.”

“Liv, you sound terrible!” Linda rose to place her hand against her daughter’s forehead, feeling her temperature.

She sniffed a wall of snot back into her sinuses. “I feel terrible.”

“You’re not feverish. Still, you’d better stay home today.”

“No, I can’t! We have dress rehearsals for the play today! If I miss it, they’ll replace me!”

Linda laughed. “How are you going to perform sounding like that anyway?”

“Oh, they’re doing Aristophanes,” Sebastian chimed in. “She’s the lead chorus frog.”

Olivia turned on him, furious. “What are you even saying? No one gets your stupid jokes, you loser!”

Sebastian leaned back with an easy smile and sipped on his cocoa. “It’s tough being the smart one.”

Olivia slumped onto an open chair and laid her head down on the table. “Why the heck are you so cheery today, anyway?” she asked from behind her hands.

“Your brother had a date last night, apparently,” their mother replied. She added, with a note of chagrin, “I hope you don’t have too much to be happy about.”

Olivia curled her lip in disgust. “Eww.”

Sebastian sputtered in embarrassment. “What? Who told you that?”

Linda put her hand on her hip and tilted her head at him. “Do you think your father and I wouldn’t notice the way you were dressed? Or smell your cologne? You don’t even dress up like that for church!”

‘If creased pants and a jacket would get me into heaven, I might,’ he thought.

“So when are you going to bring that little red-haired girl over to meet us?” Linda persisted. “You were fine with going over to her house to meet her father. Aren’t we good enough?”

Sebastian winced as he thought back on his disastrous dinner with Matthew Garver. He did not want a repeat of that sort of awkwardness with his own parents, especially not when things were going so well. “How do you even know what color hair she has?”

“I told her,” Olivia croaked.

“It’s a shame that Alex went after Meryl Deibert. I always said that you and Meryl would have made a great couple. But, you boys and your rules…”

Sebastian rolled his eyes so far they almost swung back up from the bottom. When it came to matchmaking, his mother existed in an alternate reality. Were she Aphrodite, she’d have set Paris up with Menelaus.

Olivia turned to her mother. “Don’t worry, it won’t last; Eva’s too nice for him.”

Sebastian stood up and sidled out from behind the table. “Are you coming to school or not?”

“Yes,” groaned Olivia.

“No,” insisted Linda.

“Good,” Sebastian replied. He snatched the car keys off the wall and walked out of the kitchen. “Try not to die, understudy.”

~*~

Sitting behind the wheel of his car proved to be a potent antidote to the buzzkill of his mother’s prying into his love life. He was in high spirits by the time he sighted Eva carefully picking her steps through the puddled sidewalks.

She trudged along under the lee of a broad, white-and-orange-striped dome umbrella, shoulders slumped and looking dispirited. Her calf-high, brown suede boots had turned a two-tone from the soaking and the edges of her black skirt clung wetly to her stockings. Sebastian pulled alongside her slowly so as to avoid splashing her with the filthy gutter water. Eva jumped at his piercing wolf-whistle and turned stiffly, her face poised halfway between an outraged scowl and a coyly self-satisfied smirk.

Sebastian tilted his head to look at her over the rim of his eyeglasses, his eyebrows wagging. “The lone ray of sunshine on this miserable day, and she’s all by herself. Why don’t you hop inside and warm up?”

“Oh, it’s you,” Evangeline said. She bent down to get a look inside the car and smiled. “I’m warm enough already, thank you very much.”

Sebastian shrugged. “Then come inside and warm me up.”

He leaned over and opened the passenger-side door for her. She ducked inside, shook out her umbrella, then folded it and flung it into the back. “Thanks for thinking of me,” she said, fastening her seatbelt.

He smirked. “I’m always thinking of you.”

“You didn’t say you were going to pick me up.”

“I like to keep you guessing. Sorry you got wet, though.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s smart of you not to pick me up in front of the house. My dad would get suspicious we were playing hooky.”

Sebastian frowned and leaned into the steering wheel as he pulled out. “Is that why you’re so hangdog? He’s giving you a hard time about our date, I take it.” His cheerful tone of voice was gone, replaced with a prickle of anger.

“Oh, no, nothing like that.” Eva reached over and brushed his arm with the back of her fingertips. “I’m just tired. I simply did not want to get out of bed this morning. On a day like this, I could sleep ’round the clock.” She yawned, as if for emphasis.

He flashed a crooked smile at her. “So… do you want to play hooky?”

“No! Definitely not! We have rehearsals today.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Sebastian said gravely. “And The Mikado could not go on without School-Girl Chorister Number Two.”

“We’re not numbered. I could be Number One for all you know,” she said with a wink. That was Eva’s characteristic good nature at work. Sebastian knew perfectly well how excited she had been for the play and how disappointed she was to get passed over for a major role. He had watched her botched audition. She was just a bundle of nerves with a creaky voice that day, robbed of all her abundant natural poise and grace by self-doubt. It hurt him just to sit there and look on helplessly; he could barely imagine how desolate Eva must have felt. And yet here she was, joking about it and diligently attending to her backup role.

“Hey, where’s Olivia? Sebastian! I hope you didn’t make her walk to school just to take me!”

Sebastian clucked his tongue. “Of course not. She’s sick at home.”

“Really?” Eva exclaimed, sounding more excited than appropriate. “I mean, that’s terrible! She worked so hard to be Peep-Bo!”

“It’s a tragedy, for sure,” Sebastian replied.

“Someone will have to take her place,” she muttered. Eva stared at the dashboard very gravely, folded her trembling hands, and placed them to her lips. She could be heard repeating something, very softly and swiftly; though Sebastian could not quite make the words out, he knew what was going through his girlfriend’s mind.

“And that someone is you, I take it,” he said, his eyebrow arched.

“Do you think Olivia would be upset? Would she hate me?” Eva’s voice was emphatic, pleading.

Sebastian chuckled. “I couldn’t care less if she did.”

“So she will?”

“Nah. She already knows she’s going to get replaced. Might as well be you. I mean, if you think you can memorize the lines—”

Before he could finish the sentence, Evangeline popped like a champagne cork, all bubbles and giddiness. “Yes! I memorized the lines of all the female characters! I knew if I was prepared, this might happen! I hoped it would!” Then, sheepishly, she clarified, “I-I mean, I never thought it would be Olivia. I feel terrible for her, really terrible.”

“I can tell.”

“Oh, be quiet.”

As the car queued up at one of Squirrel Hill’s notoriously long red lights, the conversation lulled. Eva fidgeted and tugged on her skirt, the momentary silence seeming to build up an air of nervous hesitation. At last, with a tilt of her head, she whispered conspiratorially, “So… did you hear about C.J. Gravish?”

“Yeah, my life revolves around him,” he said sarcastically. Thinking about Carl Gravish tended to make his blood pressure spike. C.J. had been his bête noire even before their showdown at the politics forum a few weeks ago, but now that Carl had started shilling for the GPRA, Sebastian held him in complete contempt. The fact that Carl’s antics had precipitated Sebastian’s spat with Evangeline wasn’t endearing, either.

“He was arrested yesterday. And beaten up, too, from what I heard.”

That got Sebastian’s attention. “What? Why? I mean, it’s about time! But what did he do?”

“Apparently, he went to vandalize the house of some anti-talent writer in Plum, but it was in broad daylight! It turned out the guy was at home and they got into a fight.” Eva, blushing with embarrassment over her gossiping, added a hasty explanation. “That’s what I remember anyway. I tried not to pay attention to it, but it was hard not to. All the kids were talking about it on YOrbit!”

Sebastian laughed loudly and enthusiastically. “That’s fantastic! I hope there’s video!”

“Sebastian!”

“Well the arrogant little prick deserves it!” He shook his head. “What a moron. He’s so used to getting away with everything at school, he probably thought he could just slime his way up the guy’s lawn in front of everybody, break a few windows, and get a round of applause.”

Evangeline chuckled. “I know! I can’t figure out what he was thinking. I don’t think he was trying to break windows, though. They said he had a can of spray paint.”

“I know what he was thinking. With Carl, it’s never enough to be a jackass; one must be a crusading and socially conscious jackass. It was more important for him to make a spectacle of the thing than it was to get away with it. He had to make his point and…” Sebastian’s voice trailed off. He bounced his head off the headrest and turned his gaze to the roof of the car, silently mouthing a profanity.

“Light’s green,” Eva said. She blinked at him, noticing his obvious discomfiture. “You were saying?”

The car rolled forward automatically, continuing on the familiar route to St. Bonaventure Academy without aid of the driver. Sebastian shook out of his reverie. “This anti-talent writer: was his name Coxe?”

“I don’t remember, but that sounds right. I can check.” Eva tapped on her tablet and started to read from the screen: “A.A. Coxe, of Rampart Road, Plum, Pennsylvania.” She looked up at him. “You’ve heard of him before?”

Amos Anson Coxe, the meta-hating Houdiniite, conspiracy monger, and Unionist blowhard had his pamphlets printed by Burleigh Multimedia, the small print-on-demand shop that Cascade had dispatched Torrent to destroy as proof of loyalty when he tried to infiltrate the GPRA. The day after, Sebastian tried to warn C.J. off with an anonymous letter, but apparently C.J. didn’t take his advice. He had no doubt that Gravish’s misadventure was a similar test of commitment.

“Yeah, I’ve heard of him,” Sebastian said, his mouth dry. “Anyway, what happened to Carl?”

“Well, he got beat up. They said he’ll be charged with trespassing and probably receive a fine. I guess he’ll be suspended again, too.”

“Again?”

“He was suspended for three days last week. Didn’t you know?”

“Impossible! Darling little Carl getting in trouble at school?”

“He was suspended for passing out those GPRA fliers. How did you not notice?”

“Please, Eva, I try not to notice Carl at all if I can help it.”

“A lot of people at school think you were the one who reported him.”

“That’s preposterous! I’m no squealer. Any problems I have with someone, I take care of them myself,” he shouted, poking himself in the chest with his thumb for emphasis.

“I told them that didn’t sound like you. Someone said that it was your revenge for C.J. humiliating you at the workshop.”

“Humiliating me?!” Sebastian sputtered. “I was humiliated? How did I get humiliated?”

Eva winced. “Those aren’t my words.”

“Does this ‘someone’ have a name?”

“It was Debbie Finneran,” she answered, quietly. “But you didn’t hear that from me.”

Sebastian slapped the steering wheel with both hands. “Of course she would say that. She’s his boon companion; they’re a two-headed snake! She’s most likely the one who turned him onto the GPRA crap in the first place.”

Debbie was one of C.J’s reliable cronies, the puffy-eyed, hump-nosed harpy who called Sebastian a Cabotist at the forum. She was also one of only two talents (besides Evangeline and himself) that he was aware of at the school: Debbie could sense electromagnetic fields, mostly to her detriment. Her power, essentially, was to convert wireless signals into migraines. But she was proud of it and talked about it constantly. She and Sebastian were longtime foes.

“Well, I wonder what the social justice twins think now that they’ve run afoul of the real thing,” he sneered.

Eva’s head tilted quizzically. Sebastian followed her scrutinizing glance to his forearm, where his violent movements had drawn back his sleeve, revealing a strip of taped gauze and the dark lines of stitches. He yanked his arm back and shook it until the sleeve fell back into place.

“Oh my goodness! What did you do to your arm?”

“Don’t change the subject!” he barked.

Evangeline persisted, her expression a mixture of shock and solicitude. “Does it hurt? Were those stitches?”

“I assure you, it doesn’t hurt anymore,” he replied with more measure. “Anyway, I’m not going to let her get away with accusing me of ratting someone out, even a scumbag like Carl.” ‘And especially not with saying I was humiliated,’ he thought.

Eva frowned, turning her head back to the windshield. Every few seconds, though, her eyes wandered back to her boyfriend’s injured arm. “All right, Sebastian,” she said, her voice quiet and dubious.

“It was the lawn mower,” he blurted. It was the same lie he’d told the doctor. “I was, uh, trying to clear out a blockage and I got sloppy. My hand slipped across the blade. Rather, my arm did.”

“Oh!” Evangeline cringed. “That sounds awful! I’m glad it didn’t get infected.”

“For sure.” Sebastian made a disgusted grimace, but he wasn’t thinking about pus and pathogens. Lying to his family was unfortunately de rigueur for a teenage vigilante; he regretted it on an ethical level, but in truth, it didn’t bother him that much. Lying to Eva, on the other hand, felt perversely gratuitous. He was going to tell her, wanted to have already told her, but the time was not yet right. He wished he hadn’t made any explanation at all.

~*~

Sebastian was still seething when he stepped through the doors of St. Bonaventure Academy, and things were bound to get worse before they got better. He needed to break the bad news of his sister’s illness to Mrs. Scott, the play director, and Debbie would likely be close at hand. Debbie played Katisha, The Mikado’s ugly, hateful villainess — a role that Sebastian felt suited her particularly well. His brain, usually fertile soil for insults, was too roiled by her slander to come up with anything good, but he knew that it wouldn’t let him down when the moment arrived. He might be sent home early with a letter of reprimand, but, by God, he would not be traduced by the likes of Debbie Finneran.

Sure enough, he saw Debbie almost as soon as he stepped into the auditorium. She was strutting in front of the stage and pitching her already grating voice to new domains of stridency.

“Looks like she’s already found someone else’s head to bite off,” Eva noted.

Despite being draped in her costume kimono, Debbie was not actually practicing her lines. By the look of things, she had broken in on a conversation of stagehands, uninvited, and was now holding forth on her very favorite hobbyhorse.

“Talents aren’t diseases, you hateful cretins!” she shouted.

“Except in your case,” one of the other kids barked back.

Meanwhile, Cheryl Scott had bustled up behind Eva and Sebastian. The theater director’s voice was as cheery as her plump, red face. “Good morning, Eva! Hope those pipes of yours are in good working order! We’ll sure need ’em!”

“Sure are!” Eva smiled. “I’ve been gargling with salt water and baking soda like you suggested. I really notice a difference!”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Scott, but my sister Olivia is sick at home with a sore throat and laryngitis,” Sebastian said.

“Oh, no! Not Peep-Bo!” she exclaimed, laying one hand on Sebastian’s shoulder while the other fluttered dramatically to her forehead. Sebastian narrowed his eyes slightly, unsure if she was making light of the situation or if these were the deep-seated habits of the sensitive thespian.

“Do you think there’s any chance — any at all — that she’ll be better before opening night?” asked Mrs. Scott.

“Uh, no, probably not. Not enough salt water and baking soda, I guess,” Sebastian quipped.

“Oh, you’re very quick, Mr. Pereira! It’s a shame you didn’t come out for the play yourself,” she said, wagging her chubby finger.

Sebastian smirked. “I can whistle all the airs to that infernal nonsense Pinafore.”

Mrs. Scott elbowed Evangeline playfully and said, “You see? Ah, but that’s the wrong play! Still, poor Olivia! Well, this is a pickle, isn’t it?”

“Actually—” Eva broke in, but her courage and her voice faltered.

Sebastian slapped her lightly on the back and put his arm across her shoulders. “Lucky for you, our lovely Miss Garver is ready to step in. She very conscientiously memorized the lines of all of the female characters, just in case.”

Evangeline glanced at him out of the corner of her eye and flashed a tentative smile. “Thanks,” she whispered.

“That is very conscientious,” Mrs. Scott said, returning a somewhat hesitant smile of her own. Clearly, she still had her doubts about Evangeline’s composure. “Well, it almost sounds like a conspiracy! You wouldn’t be putting over your sister for the benefit of this young woman’s attentions, would you?” Mrs. Scott tittered and waved her hand. “Of course I’m joking! But are you really up for it, Eva?”

“I really did memorize her lines. And most of the songs are the same, so you know I can do them,” Eva insisted, bouncing on her legs as if they were springs.

“Thank goodness! The show can go on! Eva, you will be the new Peep-Bo!”

“Thank you so much! I won’t let you down!”

Just then, the heated exchange before the stage erupted into full commotion, with shouted threats and imprecations. Eva and Sebastian turned to watch the fray while Mrs. Scott fluttered down the aisle on the tips of her toes, waving her arms and calling for order. Debbie Finneran, doing her best impression of a baying hound, was not to be calmed.

“Mrs. Scott, I demand that this pair of paraphobes be removed from the crew! They’re nasty, bigoted lowlifes and I won’t work with them!”

“Mind your own business, Debbie. We were having a conversation that had nothing to do with you,” one of the pair, an underclassman, yelled back defiantly.

“They’re repeating some ignorant fear-mongering about diseased talents and they’re doing it expressly to make me feel threatened!”

“Maybe we feel threatened by you!” the other stagehand shot back. “You and C.J. are cozy with GPRA terrorists. Wouldn’t be surprised if they were behind it all. Wouldn’t be surprised if you were helping them.”

That piqued Sebastian’s interest. Evidently, they were talking about the same mysterious illness his mom warned him about this morning. If the story had already grabbed the attention of St. Bonaventure’s oblivious student body, it must have really spooked people.

Of course, Sebastian thought the young man’s allegation preposterous, and not just because he was confident that Miasma was the source of the mystery symptoms. Maladjusted though they were, neither Debbie Finneran nor C.J. Gravish were capable of abetting a germ warfare plot, which, in any case, was well beyond the grasp and vision of the GPRA. No group who held public recruitment drives in dive bars and once looked to leadership from Magnetrix could ever pull off something so complicated. Cascade had promised that a bloody war was coming, but then, as now, Sebastian considered it idle boasting, the same canned rhetoric of secular apocalypse spouted by every feckless guerrilla movement from the ComIntern to the Tanners. The Paras were not KRAKEN. Besides, plague-spreading terrorists were the sort of thing you’d see in a Nick Carter, Spymaster expy, not in real life.

Like many who trample the reputations of others, Debbie was acutely sensitive about her own, and the accusation made her hysterical. It began with a sharp, sobbing gasp like she’d been stabbed through the pancreas, followed by a prolonged whimper as her eyes, now doubled in size, filled with tears. She took on the most pathetic expression of surprise and betrayal that Sebastian had ever seen, the face of the martyred innocent. The two boys, taken by surprise and overwhelmed by this low tactic, were already making faltering gestures of apology and beginning an abashed retreat when she ran behind Mrs. Scott, cowering.

“Stay away from me!” she bawled. “Please, Mrs. Scott, don’t let them hurt me! You heard what they said!”

“All right, Debbie, calm down.” Mrs. Scott’s voice was rather flat as she reluctantly wound a consoling arm around Debbie’s shoulder. The forty-year-old actress demonstrated an admirable resistance to Debbie’s well-honed technique of emotional manipulation. “No one threatened to hurt you. Everyone take a deep breath now and—”

But Debbie wailed, pressing her balled-up fists to her eyes as she thrashed free. “They did! They hate me and they want me dead!” she babbled. “They want to murder me and they’re accusing me of crimes to justify it!”

“What the heck?” Evangeline wore a look of wide-eyed confusion and dismay.

“Always remember this,” Sebastian whispered to his astonished companion. At last, Eva would see the sort of deranged, manipulative phonies she had unwittingly set him up against two weeks ago. He crossed his arms and smiled grimly.

Mrs. Scott was losing her patience. “Debbie, you need to calm down.”

“Blood libel!” Debbie suddenly howled. She spun around, pointing an accusing finger at the entire theater. By now, a large group of confused onlookers had assembled. “Don’t you see, or don’t you want to see? The blood libel always precedes persecution! Social conditioning to justify the unjustifiable!”

Sebastian guffawed, a burst of levity which soon proved contagious. Debbie’s harangue turned brittle against the rolling, dismissive laughter. In an instant, the spellbinding power of her histrionics was broken.

Debbie eyed Sebastian like a rattlesnake. “You scum,” she hissed. “Of course you would laugh. You’d march us all into a trench and murder us if you could.”

“Debbie, enough!” Mrs. Scott shouted, laying both her hands on the girl’s shoulders. “You need to go backstage and calm down.”

Debbie screamed as she tore out of Mrs. Scott’s grip. “No! He had C.J. silenced, but he won’t silence me!” She pointed at Sebastian, her arm shaking. “You’ll get everything that’s coming to you, you hate-mongering bigot! I won’t be your willing victim! You’ll pay the price for your aggression!”

The stern, stentorian voice of Father Declan Walsh booming in the auditorium finally silenced everyone. “Deborah Finneran! Come with me this instant!”

The school’s Lead Preceptor strode down the aisle, the sleeves of his cassock straining against his powerful arms. The priest’s prematurely white eyebrows were arched severely and his heavy jaw was creased in a scowl as he pushed through the crowd and seized Debbie’s wrist. She sagged to her knees, quailing under his grip, but Father Walsh yanked her back to her feet.

“Get up! I’ll drag you all the way back to your parents’ doorstep if you don’t. I warned you that I won’t tolerate your antics in my school!” He turned fiercely on the rest of the crowd. “Everybody else, get back to work! Mrs. Scott, please make plans to go forward with the play without Miss Finneran.”

Cheryl Scott bit her fist, watching in dismay as one of her star actresses was dragged out of the auditorium.

Sebastian turned to Eva to gauge her reaction. “Do you see? Did I exaggerate even a little? Everything I told you about them is true.”

She slowly shook her head. “I don’t know what to say.”

Sebastian nodded, happily vindicated. “So… didn’t you memorize Katisha’s lines, too?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes I did.” Eva squared her shoulders and tossed back her ponytail as she stepped off toward the theater director. “Mrs. Scott? I have an idea.”

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